require-root

A utility for dealing with relative require paths in a Node project

Example usage:

In the directory that you think of as the root of the code you are writing, touch a file called .root

In that directory or any directory under that directory (subdir, subdir of a subdir, etc.), instead of doing something like this:

myLib = require('../../myLib')

You can do

// Assumes you `touch`ed example.root in the same dir as myLib.js
requireExample = require('require-root')('example')
myLib = requireExample('myLib')

And not worry about how far up the directory tree you need to go or rewriting all your ../s if you move things around

Or instead of

myModelLib = require('../../model/myLib')

You can do

requireExample = require('require-root')('example')
myModelLib = requireExample('model/myLib') // './model/myLib' also fine

For more advanced usage, you can put JSON in your .root file instead of just leaving it empty, and configure where exactly the root is -- if it isn't just in the same directory as your .root file, ex.

model.root:
    {"rootPath":"./model/"}

Or

some-code-somewhere-totally-different-on-my-filesystem.root:
    {"rootPath":"/absolute/path/to/somewhere/totally/different"}

There is also an analog of require.resolve, so you can do

requireExample = require('require-root')('example')
pathToFile = requireExample.resolve('myLib')

There's no problem working with multiple require-resolves in the same file. Ex.

requireResolve = require('require-resolve')
requireModel = requireResolve('model')
requireView = requireResolve('view')
requireController = requireResolve('controller')

The resolution and reading of the .root files is cached, and should only have to happen once per require-resolve, so this shouldn't cause any performance problems under most circumstances.

A more detailed, concrete example, (from the test/ directory of this package)

Given a directory structure that looks like this:

.
└── alpha
    ├── bravo
    │   ├── charlie
    │   │   └── index.js
    │   ├── delta
    │   │   └── my-module.js
    │   ├── example2.root
    │   └── my-module.js
    ├── example.root
    └── my-module.js

when ./alpha/bravo/charlie/index.js

contains the code

requireRoot = require('../../../../index')

requireExample = requireRoot('example')
requireExample2 = requireRoot('example2')

console.log('example#my-module', requireExample('my-module'))
console.log('example2#my-module', requireExample2('my-module'))
console.log('example#bravo/my-module', requireExample('bravo/my-module'))

will result in this output:

example#my-module { success: true }
example2#my-module { moreSuccess: true }
example#bravo/my-module { success3: true }

The data structures logged are the module.exports from ./alpha/my-module.js ./alpha/bravo/delta/my-module.js ./alpha/bravo/my-module.js respectively